Doctor Who: Short Trips: The Best-Laid Plans

It’s a question writers get asked all the time. Politicians
and dictators rarely get asked the same question but seem determined to tell
everybody at length in memoir after memoir after interminable memoir.

People have a tendency to assume everyone gets their ideas
from some individual place in their brain. But imagine, just for a moment,
that’s not the case.

Meet Dracksil Forg, idea salesman. For the right price,
he’ll imagine you any darned thing you want, from the plot of a major
blockbuster novel to a way to crush your local star system under your boot
heel. The plans will be detailed, precise, not always easy but always, always,
foolproof. If you follow Dracksil’s recipe, you’ll get the result you want.

Every time.

And the best bit is that he’s strictly an ideas man.
Strictly a service industry. Not for him the ethical qualms of an activist. He
merely solves any equation you bring him for X, where X is the desired result.

Dracksil Forg is a gorgeous idea in the Doctor Who
universe because he’s not, in himself, evil, but he is, or at least seems to
be, a kind of anti-Doctor, a profit-incentivised version of our favourite Time
Lord. Where the Doctor goes careering through time and space, fixing random problems
he encounters, Dracksil Forg sits perfectly still in his own time and space,
and waits for problems to walk through his door. For the right amount of money,
they leave with a solution. The cosmos changes as a result of his actions, but
Dracksil Forg is like a ghostwriter – he never puts his name to the actions
that ensue from his plans, but those who need him will know his name.

Except…

Except he’s started to come to the notice of someone else.
Some lanky, grumpy beanpole with fighting eyebrows and a runaway mouth. Some
would-be legend who, for instance, when paid to poison a particular dignitary
at a dinner, somehow manages to ensure they go home remarkably unpoisoned.
Someone who when faced with a drone army of killbots reprograms them to pick
plastic out of the oceans instead. Someone who when he encounters a cut-price
quantum Death Star…waves a screwdriver at it and turns it into a planetary
vending machine.

The Doctor.

Very specifically in this instance, the Twelfth Doctor, as
voiced by Jacob Dudman. The story is essentially a shedload of set-up and
bedding in, a handful of examples of how the Doctor is causing, shall we say,
radical customer dissatisfaction on the part of Dracksil’s latest clients (Can
you imagine the reviews? Nobody wants to have an army of killbots turn green
crusader on them just after they’ve issued their proclamation of power, it just
makes you look a pillock), and then a build-up to one of those confrontations
in which the Twelfth Doctor particularly excels. When Dracksil and the Doctor
face each other in Dracksil’s office (like everyone else, the Doctor has to
come and see Dracksil, rather than vice versa), what we get is an immensely
satisfying confrontation, not because of any raised voices – the Twelfth Doctor
is often most effective when he lowers his voice – but because it
absolutely shines with pure distilled Twelfth Doctor tones. There’s a
left-field beginning, that seems there just for the fun, but isn’t. There’s an
explanation of what’s really going on, opening Dracksil’s eyes to a truth even
he has never worked out about himself. There’s a fairly casual insult or two,
because, after all, this is the Twelfth Doctor. And then there’s the
hope. The Twelfth Doctor’s hope that the universe can be better than its
default setting of grim and grasping nastiness if it just dares to be
imaginative. If it dares to use its little pudding brains, and can find the better
way to be. Pudding, not poison. Greenbots, not killbots. Hunger-ending vending
machines, rather than planet-blasting death machines. Think, is the
Twelfth Doctor’s main theme. Think. And then be kind.

Ben Tedds won the 2019 Paul Spragg Memorial Opportunity with
this story, and it’s easy to hear why. The imaginative leap involved in
inventing Dracksil Forg is the kind of blow-your-hair-back brilliance that
seems obvious once it’s been done, but which takes a very particular
energy of mind to actually invent (arguably in itself pre-empting the theme of
the story). The notion of Dracksil’s business – a kind of ‘We can imagine it
for you wholesale’ service industry, dealing with its clients at a long
business distance speaks to both great science fiction, in the lines of Philip
K Dick and Douglas Adams, and to our real world service industries today who,
when things go wrong, scuttle away with their hands raised and claim it was
nothing to do with them. You could arguably draw a line between what Dick did
for memory and perception in We Can Imagine It For You Wholesale and
what Adams did for faith and belief with his electronic monk in Dirk
Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Tedds does here for the creative
imagination – he farms it out to a service provider, irrespective of what the intended
goal might be, and Dracksil Forg is that service provider. It’s an idea
that absolutely has legs in the New Who universe, and you can easily imagine
how the premise and the examples of the Doctor’s plan-thwarting could have been
expanded to fit a whole TV episode.

It feels like Tedds knows his expanded Who-universe, giving
us a kind of Easter egg here in the form of a bird-people species from the
local cosmic area of the Shansheeth, only where the funeral directors were
vulture-people, Tedds gives us legal…ach, you can probably work out which birds
he has working heavily in the legal profession. No?

And above all, the spirit of the Twelfth Doctor sings out
from the ending of this story. He’s not against people having ideas. He’s not
even against people paying someone else to have their ideas for them. But he
wants to collapse the callous disregard Dracksil’s allowed himself to have for
consequences, arguably echoing the ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’
line of the likes of the NRA in our modern world. Guns absolutely don’t kill
people if no-one has the idea for guns, and the people who do have the
idea for guns can’t be separated from the consequences of their ideas.
Likewise, the Doctor argues here, people who have the idea for planet-killing
weapons or drone armies need to face up to the consequences of the ideas they
have, and the ideas they sell to a hungry marketplace. Especially when kindness
and imagination will allow them to have better ideas. Kinder ideas.
Ideas that make the universe a better place, rather than a deader place.

It’ll be interesting to see where Tedds’ career goes from
here, but wherever it is, it’ll be worth watching. And any time he gets another
Big Finish gig, you’re going to want to pre-order that thing, because The
Best-Laid Plans punches well above the weight of a new author Short Trip, weaving
some fairly hardcore sci-fi philosophy into the carpet of a thumping good
adventure story with some pitch-perfect Twelfth Doctoring to give you a shot of
Old Attack Eyebrows that feels like it could have been lifted straight from the
screen. The best-laid plans may aft gang wherever they like, but make getting a
copy of this story the best plan you lay today and you’ll end your day with a
Twelfth Doctor smile. Guaranteed by Dracksil Forg. Tony Fyler

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